742 days ago

I made a note to myself on my iPhone as follows:

Dominant eye
Veins/blood
New York City


Before I started carrying a new phone, I used this Notes feature primarily for addresses, account numbers, and story ideas. In this case, I wish I had given myself a little more to work with.

writing comics diversions

A comic apropos to yesterday's post about iPhone e-readers, which I meant to include but forgot:

I didn't manage to go camping this summer, but I did go to a cabin and I was looking forward to reading books on my iPhone there -- until I lost track of my charger for the whole trip! That's one advantage a book will always have. It never runs out of batteries.

Debbie Ohi at Inkygirl.com, author of the comic above, does lots of wonderful writing-related comics and posts tons of great writing links and ideas on her site. Always good for a procrastinating click or two (or more...). Here's another recent favourite of mine:

I've definitely become one of those people who try to excise all their adverbs, so this comic hit close to home!

Reading ebooks on the iPhone

So the reason I've been reading Dracula is the wonderful Classics app on my iPhone. The look and feel of the thing is incredible, and I love that I can read it in bed with the lights off. The pages are a lovely cream colour and I can flick them, silently, with a stroke of my finger. There's no difficulty in positioning the thing to see, as there would be with a hardcover, with my head on the pillow. If I stop turning pages, it shuts itself off. And it totally removes the need for a book light, which has already come in handy for me while sharing a hotel room earlier this month.

Thus far I haven't seen the appeal of e-readers (why would I want to start carrying yet another device?), but there is something wonderful about always having something to read right in my phone. For one thing, it makes my purse a lot lighter. It isn't the first e-reader I got for my iPhone, but so far it's the best. And since I downloaded it, there have been a bunch of similar applications released. I'm probably going to get something called the "Charles Dickens collection" next, because that will definitely be easier to lug around than the actual novels.

When it comes to buying e-books rather than paper books, I don't know where I stand. Everything I've been reading so far has been in the public domain. I'm so much of a bibliophile that I can't imagine not wanting the actual object, but possibly I would consider it for trashy reads -- say if I was somehow dying to read the new Dan Brown or something else I wouldn't want to actually ever put on a shelf. But we'll see.

But anyway, hurray for e-readers on the iPhone! From the looks of things, it sounds like Apple is well-positioned to take over the e-reader market. According to a story today on Mashable, book application downloads for the the iPhone have even outstripped game downloads.